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Lee Hamblin
Summary ---- On a stroll through the Hoovervilles of Old Town, one might wonder as to the story of one of those hungry men gathered near a foul-burning trash fire. Some rave at passers-by, some drink, some sleep. Lee Hamblin leers at you; a mean old greyhound, a stray kicked one too many times. A glance in his direction is all he wants from you; so you can peer, if only for a passing second, into his wild flint eyes — into a well of sharp pain and perception deeper than his gambling debts. A farmhand, a stonemason, a rigger, a swindler, a gambler, a fire-blooded pistoleer — a dishonest man so far in the hole that he's given honest thought to an honest day's work. He calls himself Stagger Lee. Description ---- Here leers a dust-caked, sun-beaten husk of a man, craggy and antediluvian as the plains he calls home. Ragged, rugged, and rough, most who happen across this fellow take him for one of the many homesteaders-turned-panhandlers that populate shanty towns across Westfall; the shoe might even fit if not for his partiality to boots. Under closer inspection, the harness of dwarven flintlocks strapped across his chest and the impish, gnashed-teeth grin plastered to his face spins a different story entirely — the story of a rambler, a surly, revenant son of the boot hills. Ths intractable specimen was born Wesley Hamblin, though he'd surely introduce himself differently — usually by the proud monicker "Stagger Lee", earned for the oddity and lurch of his gait. The more pious among the Light's devotees might (justifiably) call it a tribulation just to set eyes on this heathen, for the mere sight of Lee cuts like the blustery fury of a Westfall twister. Lee is imposing, of above average height and possessed of lanky, sturdy frame; what he lacks in sheer mass between broad-set shoulders he makes up for in compact and tightly-corded muscle, product of a transient life and bouts of malnourishment. Lee moves with all the urgency of a tumbleweed, only harried when a storm is on his heels. On a wuthering west wind, Lee navigates the world with off-kilter fluency, swaggering with a one-of-a-kind gait, a limp in his right leg making for a perpetual lurch. Stubborn as the Rock of Gibraltar, there's a look of gleeful insubordination in his ever-squinting, flint-hued eyes, as if unyielding in a staring contest with the sun. Steep and rutty as the rest of him, his features come to jagged points, the shape of his face bearing striking resemblance to a coyote — no coincidence, considering his scavenging ways. His only redemption is in his gravely, succoring drawl, with which the old world proverbs and countryside idioms of a folk balladeer are rendered in a coat of molasses. You won't hear Lee's story from his own mouth. There are, however, a few clues stained on his body in time-worn ink — the likeness of some androgynous mercreature on his left shoulder suggesting some past affection for the sea, a chisel and mortar emblem on his right forearm marking a membership in the now-defunct Stormwind Stonemasons Guild, and the morbidly humorous instructions to 'bury with boots on' scrawled across his chest in stylized font.